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On the holiday beach and around your favourite café tables, there’s a conversation that needs having. It’s about the future of nature and other minor details affecting you and your only planet.

It seems increasingly odd, that the best hours of the best days of the best years of many environmentalist’s lives have been absorbed in a peculiar effort, using human’s position of supremacy to pit bits of nature against each other.

Like many things, it began with the pursuit of profit. In the day, who could argue against a profitable possum industry?

But what was good business came at a terrible price to nature, in this case driving our feathered species to rarity and extinction. So now we unleash a stable of poisons to kill these demonised furry animals in hopes of giving the winged chosen a fighting chance.

Is conservation all about playing at being god of Aotearoa, by killing one to protect another? Or is it possible that persistently pursuing furry evils has distracted some of us from more pressing matters? Our consumption driven, collapse-prone economy springs to mind.

For such a small land, we’re in the top ten in terms of ecological footprint per person. This unthinking consumption coupled with a business system that rewards short-term profits at the expense our rivers, soils and skies is no doubt sending our planet into a death spiral.

As a people, we should not be in a position of having an economy that grows only at the expense of the environment, the very air we breathe and water we drink.

As we re-build the engines of commerce from their crumpling carcasses, we need to build an economy that grows in tune with nature rather than against it.

And that is a matter of political leadership, as the technology is here, far ahead of the politicians, and evolving fast.

A world with a clean and green is totally possible, if we are willing to temper greed and harness the great potential of New Zealand to paths favouring clean business practices.

So, are we better pumping poisons for the sake of a few feathered species; or empowering sustainable economies which don’t cost the earth and will offer the best long term protections for nature in New Zealand, whether that nature be of native or exotic hue?

4 Comments

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Both need to be focused on. I can recall visits to places where intensive pest management is carried out and to islands which have had mammalian predators exterminated. This has a much more wide ranging effect than on the (usually) one species that the area is fabled for. All native flora and fauna flourish. For our consumption crazy society an impact needs to be made on a personal level first. Hopefully this will create a groundswell of public opinion. This is where things can start to change for the better. Organisations like Forest and Bird can assist with this by helping to guide the individual and the company in a positive direction.

I like your comment about pausing during this economic downturn and looking at the opportunity it presents: to re-build an economy that is in tune with nature. At least we can take comfort from the fact that this economic slowdown means that we’re doing less damage to our environment. Some countries might even meet their kyoto protocol agreements if this recession persists!

I think that humans are the biggest pest that ever existed. all the opossums or dear or rabbits or pests will never do as much damage as human beings so get rid of humans I say and then everything will flourish